


just you

by abeaufortinnewyork



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-04-10
Packaged: 2019-03-29 08:25:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 7,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13923216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abeaufortinnewyork/pseuds/abeaufortinnewyork
Summary: a collection of drabbles posted on my tumblr, @beautyandtheren.(as of now, I am taking prompts over there!)





	1. stay

He advances on Rey, the ignited lightsaber held loosely in one hand. But there is no threat in his approach.

Somehow, suddenly, that scares her even more.

And now he’s moving closer, casting aside the lightsaber, narrowing the distance between them in several long strides, and his face is glinting with sweat and his irises are molten amber, pits of dark fire —

“Ben,” she says, half-frightened, holding her arms in front of her chest.

But he pays her no heed. Instead he drags her roughly, inelegantly against his chest, one black-wrapped arm firm and solid around her waist. His face moves downward in a blur, and when she feels his mouth mold to hers, something in her chest sighs in relief, as if she’d known all along that this would happen, and had waited for it, longed for it, dreamed of it.

It’s a clumsy thing, his kiss, raw and desperate. There is no elegance to this man, even this son of a princess, but there is no elegance to her either. 

 _You, a scavenger._  

It seems so long ago now, the day they met. Now, as his mouth slants still more frantically across hers, prying her lips open, she remembers how in vain she’d struggled against him, against this thing between them, this thing that blossoms and pulses now in the narrow, closing spaces between their bodies. 

“Stay,” he pleads, drawing back, his breaths coming quickly now. But it’s as if he can’t survive a moment without his lips on her skin, because he ducks his head again to brush a hot swath of kisses up her throat to her ear. “Stay with me.”

It tears her heart open. “Ben—”

But before she can give him an answer — maybe he’s afraid of it, she thinks — he kisses her again, and she wonders if the salt she tastes on his lips is sweat or tears.

Now she’s clawing her hands up his back, into his tangled hair, and kissing him back with a desperation that’s half war, half surrender. “Ben, please,” she breathes against his mouth: a plea for what, she does not know. “Ben, _Ben_ —”

“You know,” he says, the words muffled against her lips, her jaw. “You know it in your blood, in your soul, just like I do. You have to stay.” 

And she does. Even now the Force sings around them, as if it’s alive, and glad for their closeness. She pulls him tighter, more desperately against her, clutching at his back, burying her face in the warm crook of his black-clad shoulder. In her vision he’d worn grey. 

“But not here,” she whispers into his neck. “Not like this.”

“Where else?” He drags his hands up her neck to frame her face, fingers flexed taut against her cheekbones. “Rey,” he murmurs, his voice dark velvet around her name. “Don’t you see? Snoke is dead.” A new spark glints in his eye. “We could rule together and bring a new order to the galaxy.”

Now she thinks her heart is bleeding. Her lips part, but she cannot summon the words to reject him. Not now, not when her skin is still warm from his kisses, when her soul still cries out to his. And so they stay there, his hands clutched desperately at her face, her mouth locked in perpetual stillness by words it cannot speak, and the Force humming lowly, warningly between them.


	2. here, let me

It was Leia the princess, not Leia the general, who had insisted that the Resistance delegation to Naboo be outfitted in the elaborate court dress of their hosts. The princess had taken a special interest in dressing Rey, for whom she ultimately chose a dress of emerald chiffon. “I always wanted a daughter,” Leia had said, smiling sadly as she’d fastened the last golden pin into Rey’s hair. “Someone to wear all my grandmother’s dresses. I’m glad I found her, even if she isn’t my blood.”

The dress, soft like the satin run of water and impossibly elegant, is one of many luxuries to which Rey has been suddenly, almost rudely, introduced on Naboo. Another is the heady blossom wine, which had tasted so sweet upon her virgin tongue at supper and now betrays her, dulling her senses and sorely hindering her mobility. Long after supper, in the quiet privacy of her rooms, she’s become a giggling mess of limbs, arms hooked wildly around her back, fingers blindly grasping at the delicate gilded clasps of her gown.

The wine’s effect on her senses is so complete that she hardly notices the telling whine of the Force, the ring of time and space tightening in her ears, the tender twinge in her chest.

“Here,” comes his voice, low and rumbling across the stars, “let me.”

Now, yes, now she notices him. “No,” Rey grumbles, stumbling away from her newly-appeared visitor. Even in her inebriety, she knows to resist him, resent him, reject him. “I’m managing _just fine_ by myself.”

“Are you?” Stars, is that laughter in his tone? Rey’s brow furrows.

But before she can bite back some scathing response, he surprises her by emitting a soft, choking gasp as he surveys the length of her figure. “That dress,” he breathes quietly. “It belonged to my grandmother.”

Rey furrows her brow again. “It’s mine now,” she goads him. “Just like your grandfather’s lightsaber.”

For once he doesn’t take the bait. There’s no spark of anger in his eye, no spiteful twitch in his fingers. Instead he shifts thoughtfully in his chair — his throne? — and leans forward to study her. “I remember seeing it among my mother’s things,” he muses quietly. “You must be on Naboo.”

“I am not,” she snaps back, though any real edge in her tone is lost in the drunken slur of her words. “I could be anywhere. There are plenty of royal courts in this galaxy. I could be visiting any of them.” And with a sharp pivot, as if to declare the conversation definitively ended, she turns away — but missteps, tripping on the long train of the gown and collapsing inelegantly to the floor. _Kriff_.

“Let me help you,” he says, standing now. “Before you hurt yourself.”

“Isn’t it to your favor if I hurt myself?” she mumbles, almost ashamed, as she turns and reluctantly presents to him the elaborate cascade of clasps down her back.

He scoffs and murmurs something, quietly and under his breath. It almost sounds like, “Never.”

By now they’re both well acquainted with the peculiar metaphysics that allows them the intimacy of touch across millions of light years. But still, even now, across the great wide swath of space and stars that separates them, it astonishes her to feel so acutely the warm brush of his thumbs against her neck. It sets her skin to prickling, laces her nerves with twin strains of frost and fire. The clasps come undone, one by one under the slow and delicate work of his fingers, and Rey finds herself utterly still, hovering on the edge of some dangerous precipice.

The bond sings at their closeness.

Behind her, his breaths come more quickly, more shallowly. Once on their descent his fingers slip, and he drags his knuckles a beat too long down her spine. Rey shivers, feeling her chill echoed through the bond, and almost turns to rebuke him. But the feeling is too sweet, too thrillingly cool and tender, and so she stays silent.

Emboldened, he slips his fingers between the delicate chiffon and the warm expanse of her skin, trailing them gently across the curve of her back. Rey’s breath hitches rudely in her throat. “Ben,” she whispers, a quiet plea: they both know it for surrender.

When at last she feels the soft, smooth flesh of his lips against her shoulder, she sighs so deeply she almost moans. His probing hand snakes around to her stomach, pressing gently to bring her body flush against his. Now her senses roar back to life, thrumming equally with her pleasure and, through the bond, his.

For a long time she’s content to stay there, caught in some delirious halfway between standing and reclining against his chest, as his palm massages her belly and his lips trail languidly from her shoulder to her ear and back again. But the longer she stays still, the longer her stomach twists in heated, frustrated knots, and at last, in a heady fog of drunkenness and pleasure and whispers of destiny, she turns in his arms and lifts on her toes to mold her mouth to his.


	3. safe

At night she dreams.

Some dreams are familiar: the island, Jakku, shadowy faces and whispers she’d once thought belonged to her parents. Others are darker, more violent. She dreams of Snoke’s torture. She dreams of a red lightsaber in her scarred and shaking hands. She dreams that she is baptized in a river of blood, her will and her life and her love fading to death and nothingness in the dark vacuum of the Force. 

When she wakes, the night is cold and empty, seeping its chill from the open window into her skin. There are precious few women left in the Resistance, still fewer fit to sleep in the bunk room instead of the med bay — and none of them ever as bone-deep afraid as Rey now finds herself, none of them able to comprehend the depth of her fear. She feels herself in the Force: a storm of nervous energy in a sea of sleeping calm. 

When the bond blossoms open, and the Force seems to peel back its layers in revealing him before her, she almost cries out in relief. How well the Force knows her. Knows them both. 

His face is tense, guarded. He swallows. 

“Rey.”

“Come here,” she says.  

It’s a surprise for both of them, she thinks, because the moment the words have left her lips she wishes she could snatch them out of the ether. His eyes widen, uncertainty radiating through the bond. But there’s a tenderness in the way his face opens, a boyish earnestness that reminds her of his curiosity in the first, charged few of these communions across the stars. 

“Please,” she says, holding out her hand.

The irony is not lost on him. Her heart skips at the sight of his lip twitching softly upward.

Still he advances toward her, his footsteps soft and slow. She’s startled to find that she can hear them, as if he were really here, as if it were flesh and blood that padded now across the floor. And when she reaches to him, takes his hand, she thinks it might be. His skin is impossibly warm beneath her fingers.

Rey pulls him down to the bed. 

“Why?” he breathes, his voice disbelieving, as his body relaxes against hers. She can feel the quickening pulse of his heartbeat against her back.

“You make me feel safe,” she answers, tugging his arm around her waist and closing her eyes, as if she would forget the Resistance, the First Order, the war and the galaxy between them.  

Then, more softly, as his arm tightens protectively around her and she turns her head into her pillow: “You make me feel whole.”


	4. love poems

He’s just finished lining her name in gold when, suddenly and all at once, he senses her presence at the threshold behind him. 

Then her voice: “You’re so adorable.”

Ben freezes. His cheeks grow hot as he sets his pen down, turns almost indignantly to face her. “What?”

“Adorable,” she repeats, moving into the room. Her robes flit softly about her ankles as she walks. “With the calligraphy.”

“It’s an ancient art practiced by some of the mightiest civilizations in the history of the galaxy,” he protests, resisting the urge to pull her down into his lap as she draws close. “It’s not adorable.”

“Oh, my mistake,” Rey answers, dropping her chin and pursing her lips in mock solemnity. “You’re a very serious scholar, I see. What are you working on?”

The flush in his cheeks returns with a vengeance. “An old project,” he mumbles, moving quickly to hide the gold-edged paper from her sight.

But she reaches down and stills his hand with hers, as if in protest. “Ben, it’s stunning,” she whispers. Her fingers trace dreamily over the letters. “What does it mean?”

He gulps, almost embarrassed. But the wonder in her eyes is genuine, the softness of her features strangely comforting. “It’s… a, um. A poem.” He scratches nervously at the back of his neck. “For you.”

“A love poem?”

“Well.” Her eyes are soft now, impossibly tender, and when she reaches for his face he has to blink to convince himself he’s awake and alive. “If it’s for you,” he says softly, “then I guess it must be.”

“Will you read it to me?” she says, bending down to whisper in his ear. “When it’s done.” Now she nuzzles his neck, her nose grazing the puckered skin of his scar. 

The soft kiss of her breath stokes a flame in his chest. “Even better,” he answers, and brushes his temple against hers. “I’ll teach you how to read it yourself.”

She draws back, eyes sparking. “Are you saying I need a teacher?”

He flinches. It still pains him to remember that night, to remember how savagely he’d challenged her. “I’m saying,” he counters warily, “that you have something to learn, and that I happen to know enough to teach you.”

Rey senses his faltering, and through the Force he feels her answering calm. “You’re saying we complement each other,” she murmurs. “We complete each other.” 

“Yes.” The churning in his chest ebbs, gives way to a flood of warmth. 

Rey smiles, threading her fingers through his hair. “Well, on that, Ben Solo,” she says, dipping her head to kiss him, “I imagine we’ll always agree.”


	5. a chance encounter

It’s close to dusk on the eve of Thanksgiving when, leaving his local Whole Foods, Kylo feels his phone buzz. A flare of exasperation ripples through him, and he tugs the phone roughly of his back pocket. “Christ, Dad,” he mutters, squinting through the gathering dark in search of his car. “I told you — I’ve got the fucking turkey, okay? I’ll be back in ten minutes.“

“I know you’ve got the turkey,” Han answers, equally piqued. “Takes a real dumbass to forget the turkey the day before Thanksgiving. Your uncle was wondering if you remembered to get the milk, too.”

“Yeah, tell him I got his hipster ass some twenty-dollar organic milk from”—Kylo squints at the label—“Ahch-To? Where even _is_ that?”

But his father’s answer sounds only distantly in his ear. Kylo looks up, stunned, as a streaking flash of limbs suddenly emerges from behind him in hot pursuit of a black-clad runaway lumbering into the bowels of the parking lot.

Han is still droning on about the health benefits of Ahch-Toan milk when the flash of limbs — a girl, Kylo sees now, with her hair tied up in three buns — tackles the brigand to the ground and wrests a small object from his hands. Kylo watches in awe as she stands over his fallen figure, clenching her teeth proudly. 

His awe deepens, shudders out through his whole body, when she crosses the parking lot to where he stands. He cuts off his phone.

The girl holds out his wallet. “It fell out of your pocket.”

Kylo suddenly finds himself unable to speak. Never mind his wallet: there’s something captivating about the way this girl’s chest heaves, just glinting with a fine sheen of sweat, and the feather-soft curls of hair that frame her freckled face. It’s a beautiful face, almost delicate, but somehow it still fits seamlessly with the sinews of strength he imagines rippling under her fair skin.

As she catches her breath, her lips hang open just slightly, exhaling rhythmically into the cool nighttime air between them. 

“No need to thank me,” she says, retracting the outstretched wallet for a moment to flip it open and study his driver’s license, “Ben.”

“Actually,” he mumbles, suddenly embarrassed, “it’s Kylo.”

The girl’s eyes narrow. Even in the weak light that filters out through the store windows, he catches twin flashes of green. “Well, I’m Rey,” she says, extending a hand. 

When he takes it, his traitorous heart skips, and he knows he’s in trouble.


	6. blind

How she wishes she hated him.

It’s a cruel and strange curse, she reflects often, that she should be made to feel for her enemy as she does. That she should be made to remember him not in heated bolts of blood and fury, but in soft, tender whispers of comfort, of understanding, of some transcendent completeness that even now, even after all he’s done, she craves from him alone. 

It’s crueler still that a whole galaxy, a great dust-clouded swath of cold space and nothingness, should not be enough to keep them apart.

He comes to her now, when she’s alone and training beneath a velvet-domed night sky. “It’s been a while,” she says flatly at the first flare of his Force signature. “I was beginning to think I was free.” 

“No,” he answers lowly, and she chances a look up. The sight of him alone sets her bones to a cool and nervous shiver. When he speaks again, it’s after a long, perilous silence, and his voice thrums with a note of foreboding. “I don’t think either of us will be free for a long time.” 

“Well,” she murmurs, summoning the courage to stand and face him, “you are the Supreme Leader. You must have more control than I do over our freedom.”

The Force never roars louder than when they’re standing opposite each other, regret and anger and longing coursing between them. Now, as she faces him half in challenge, half in surrender, its thunder rumbles through her bones.

But all at once something softens: a cooling mist follows the storm, and he steps closer, closer, closer, until his face is tilted over hers, and the thundering in her bones gives way to a sudden melt.  “Rey,” he whispers, touching her cheek, his fingers running like ghosts over her skin. “ _Rey._ Come back to me. You belong at my side.” Ghosts no longer, his fingers, as they tense into a vice-like grip. “I would give you worlds,” he hisses through clenched teeth.

Her heart turns to stone, her blood to ash. “Ben—”

“It isn’t too late,” he murmurs, eyes afire. “The offer still stands. It _always_ will—”

With a shudder, she wrenches herself away from him. “No.” 

_This is the right thing. This is the right thing. This is the right thing._

_Isn’t it?_

Rebuked again, he stands apart from her, face flushed and chest heaving. “Then you are blind to your destiny,” he says lowly. “I can give you everything. They can give you _nothing._ ”

Rey blinks furiously, wills to death the flood of tears that threatens just beneath her eyelids. “You need to go,” she mutters.

He does nothing but stand there, all dark majesty in the obsidian storm of his imperial robes, and stare her down with eyes that would turn out her soul.

“I said go!” she thunders now, and flings her arm into the air, pointing to the distant horizon as if to banish him to its shadows. 

“I can’t,” he hisses back. The words break over something like grief.

Rey clenches her fists at her sides, heaves her will into the tensing bond between them. “Then I can,” she whispers, and the connection shatters, broken, into the stars. She breaks with it, crumpling to the earth, and chokes a sob into the back of her hand.


	7. sleep

It’s with a triumphant roar, and a dazzling grin to match, that Rey throws down her winning cards. Finn groans, rocking back from the table with a helpless upward gesture of his hands. Rose just laughs, and Poe immediately turns on BB-8, who’d dealt their hands, and hisses lowly, “You were supposed to helping _me,_ buddy.” 

But suddenly there’s a familiar whining in her ears, and the very air around her seems to tingle; Rey turns her head, perhaps a bit too eagerly, to find him there, as he always is. Tonight he’s tangled in his sheets, caught in that dreamlike haze between sleep and waking, and just beginning to shift across the wide expanse of his bed.  

“You guys keep playing without me,” Rey says, standing from the table.

Finn sighs. “We can’t play with just three!”

“Find someone else,” she returns, already distracted, and slips into the adjacent room.

By now he’s lifted his head from his pillow, his sleep-heavy eyes flickering groggily around him: alighting on her, flaring briefly. 

“Sorry, were you sleeping?” she whispers, biting her bottom lip to keep down her wolfish grin.

“Yes,” he mutters, and turns over, tugging the sheets up and over his shoulder.

But her sabacc victory has emboldened her, spiriting her with a sudden thrill of childlike mischief, and she climbs into bed beside him, marvels at how softly the dark silk sheets kiss her skin. Her arms snake around his chest, hands running down the firm muscle of his abdomen. “Well, you’re awake now,” she hums into his spine. 

He mutters something unintelligible into his pillow.

“Hmm?” Now she rises over his shoulder, ghosts a kiss over the scarred skin there, dips her head and nuzzles his neck. A curious hand trails down to his hip, cuts toward— 

“No,” he sighs, “no, Rey, I _really_ need to sleep.” But slowly, maybe in spite of himself, he rolls over to face her, his wide palm coming up to cradle the curve of her cheek. At the sight of his face, pale and open in the starlight, she can’t help herself: she touches her lips chastely to his, shifts to drop feather-soft kisses along his cheek, his jaw, his throat, the wide plane between his collarbone and his shoulder. 

“Then sleep,” she murmurs at last, only half-reluctantly, and lays her cheek against his chest, sighing gently at the warmth of his skin. His heart pulses steadily in her ear, and as she twines her legs with his, closing her eyes, she wonders if, somehow, it isn’t her heart too.


	8. scar tissue

Rey has wanted this for months. Since the night he appeared to her bare and broken, and she’d seen for herself how deeply and magnificently she’d marked his flesh.  

Now her thumb traces a trembling, eager path across the puckered scar, trailing from his cheek to the moon-white expanse of his chest. Ben’s mouth hangs open as he watches her, mystified and wondering. The air between them is deathly quiet.

A strange, possessive hunger compels her, almost unthinkingly, to strain toward his face and kiss the crown of his scar, just above his brow. He sighs under her kiss, so she ghosts her lips lower, down across his cheek. Now to his neck, now further still, lifting a hand to cradle his cheek as she feathers a thousand kisses across his shoulder, collarbone, chest. 

“I remember,” she says quietly. “I gave you this.”

“I was well matched,” he returns. “For once.”

A thrill of pride sings in her veins, then gives way to something milder, gentler, something that curls with feather-soft tendrils around her heart. “Forever,” she says. 

Suddenly Ben takes her hand, raises it to his lips, presses a warm kiss into the soft flesh of her palm.

But when his hand moves to free her arms from their bindings, her breath catches rudely in her throat, and she croaks, “Ben—”

“It’s alright,” he murmurs, and the velvet croon of his voice soothes her. The wrappings come off slowly under the nimble work of his fingers, revealing long, slender arms scarred and bruised by years of scavenging in the jagged, shrapnel-ridden wreckage of fallen starships. 

A flush of shame heats her cheeks, and she looks away. 

“No,” he says, and there’s such strength in his tone that she chances a glimpse back at his face, now close to her arm. “You persisted,” he murmurs, and drops a soft, glancing kiss to the gash that cuts up her right forearm. “You survived.” Another kiss, this time at the welt near her elbow, the one she’d sustained at the other end of Unkar Plutt’s staff. “You’re strong.” Now his lips settle over the twin pincer marks left by some fearsome desert creature, so long ago she remembers nothing of it save the sudden pain its venom had shot through her blood. “Beautiful.” 

His hands, still impossibly gentle, move closer to her shoulder now, to the scar she’d sustained in the throne room. “This one,” he murmurs, smoothing the pad of his thumb across the pinched, pinkish skin. “I remember it. I saw him give it to you. I—” He swallows, throat bobbing, as if the memory pains him. “I lost myself. For a moment.”

Rey only watches as he bends to kiss it, this imprint of a long-forgotten weapon borne on a long-remembered day. “I’ll keep you safe,” he murmurs against her skin. 

She threads her fingers through his hair, leans forward to rest her cheek against the crown of his head. “We’ll keep each other safe.”


	9. questions

“Ben.”

Seated on the edge of his bunk in the _Falcon_ , Rey is almost reluctant to wake him. But her heart is too full, the soft flutter in her chest too urgently tender, to wait much longer, and she prods delicately now at his sleeping form. 

“Mmm,” he groans, half-asleep.

“I have a question,” she says, and the words come out just above a whisper.

Determined, it seems, not to indulge her, he buries his face in the pillow. “If this is about the… texts,” comes his muffled voice, “just… leave them for the morning.”

“It’s not,” she answers.

Now he turns up one cheek, his eyes flitting lazily to hers. “Can it not wait?” 

“No.”

“Well, then,” he sighs, and heaves himself into a sitting position, leaning his head lazily against the bunk. Greedily her eyes trace the path of his scar — her scar — from his forehead to the moon-white sliver of skin that peeks out from beneath his nightshirt. “Go ahead. Ask me.”

Her eyes fall to her lap, where she’s knit her hands into an anxious tangle. “It’s just—I wanted to ask,” she begins, haltingly, but the words are warm and sticky in her throat. 

“Yes, you can pilot tomorrow,” he says with a soft smirk. 

“No! It’s not that.”

“Then what is it?” he says, dropping his voice to an inquisitive whisper and taking her hand, kneading it between his. His eyes go soft. “Hmm?”

“Can we—” Now at last she glances up, holds his gaze, steadies herself. “Will you marry me?”

A thousand answering emotions chase across his face, bleed into the warm amber of his eyes, and then he cries, with a sudden urgency, “ _Rey_!” 

“What?” she gasps, panicked, heart sinking. All those nights passed in waking agony over the question, hoping and praying to the stars that he felt as she did, that they could at last seek in each other the family and belonging and understanding they’d so long been denied—

But his answer surprises her. “I— _I_ was going to ask _you_!” Ben says, eyes wide and disbelieving.  He’s sat up completely now, raking one hand through his dark mass of hair, reaching for her arm with the other. “Why do you think I have us set on a course to _Naboo_?”

“I—” Suddenly she is suffused with a terrible flood of regret, somehow sharper and more acute than the pain of rejection she’d feared, and she looks away, gaping and astonished. “Oh, Ben, I’ve ruined everything. I’m sorry. Oh, Force, I’m so sorry—”

But he cuts her off, tugging her abruptly onto his lap. “No. No,” he whispers, ducking to kiss her neck; his lips part in a breathless grin over her skin. “No, you silly, beautiful thing. How could you say that?”

There are tears into her eyes as she leans into his kisses. “Because you’d made this beautiful plan, and now I’ve gone and foiled it—”

“Not the first time you foiled one of my plans,” he breathes against her cheek. 

At this she must tuck her chin, blushing, and smile. “Is that a yes?” she ventures.

“Of course it’s a yes, you—” He draws back, considering her. A long silence passes between them as his eyes rake meticulously over her face, her neck, the heave of her chest. Rey’s heart warms in the supple, still novel way it does under his gaze. “You magical creature,” he whispers at last, leaning forward greedily to kiss her lips. “Rare, unearthly thing. Of course I’ll marry you.”

Caught up in some impossible joy, Rey smiles and sighs against his mouth, surrenders to the tender urgency of his kiss. 

“One thing,” he gasps, drawing away for a fleeting, breathless moment. Their hands are tangled in each other’s hair, their lips red and swollen from each other’s kisses, when he whispers, “The wedding. Let it be on Naboo.”


	10. awaken

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a reylo baby appears.

After Snoke’s death, his dreams change.

Gone are the fiery dreamscapes of Mustafar, the dark roiling of the Force and the rumble of his master’s voice. In their stead come sunlight, warmth, the tender blooming beauty of forest worlds he only remembers in hazes of bygone happiness.

Now, this night, he dreams he hears a woman singing.

He walks through cooling, sighing mists into a moss-carpeted forest — _Endor_. Green-growing ferns brush up lazily against his legs as he draws closer to the woman’s song. 

At last he comes into a sun-speckled clearing and sees her: a young woman robed in white, angled away from him, her brown hair drawn up in an intricate array of braids. In the crook of her neck lolls the black-haired head of a child, half-asleep, his fist curled into the folds of glinting fabric at the woman’s shoulder. 

 _Mother_.

It must be her. The song on her tongue is an old ballad of Alderaan, a love poem set to a gentle, lilting melody, that his mother used to sing as she laid him down to sleep.  Even now the lullaby echoes in his heart, comes up to his lips, and he finds himself singing the words aloud.

The child’s eyes flutter open. “Mama,” he coos, raising a pudgy finger to point at the man who’s intruded upon their peace.

The woman turns. 

His heart splinters and sinks and sings at once. It’s _her_ — her delicate face opened in tender, earnest anticipation; her eyes glowing like kyber, and softened by years of lasting peace. A peace that he feels, too, somehow, through the web of time and space between them.

A smile comes to her face, and through the Force he hears the joyful song of her soul.

“Anakin,” she says quietly, kneeling to the earth to set the child on his feet. “Go to your father.”

Suddenly he’s kneeling, opening his arms as the boy stumbles toward him, and his face grows wet with tears, and his heart gapes open, as if it would call all the light in the world unto itself and be made whole again because of this, this small creature, with her brown-green eyes and his long face, and a bubbling laugh that is life and love and everything he always wanted but never had—

But the dream falls away, dissolves to nothingness before his eyes, and when he wakes to a cold, empty bed, and nothing out his viewport but the black void of space, her voice echoes still in his ears, in his memory, in his heart.

He knows what he has to do.


	11. teacher

It’s late, obscenely late, and she’s rubbing the sleep from her eyes with the heels of her palms when something tugs at the back of her skull and her ears ring and _not now_ — but his voice is already echoing through the stars.

“You look really tired.”

“What a keen eye you have, Supreme Leader,” Rey mumbles, shuffling idly through the time-worn pages of the Rammahgon, which has proved the most challenging of the Jedi texts she’d taken from Ahch-To. 

“You haven’t been sleeping,” he says. He tilts his head, searching the tense web of emotion between them for clues. “Something’s keeping you up. What is it?”

At this she only scoffs. “As if I would tell you.”

But now he stands, drops his eyes and squints in the direction of her desk. To her chagrin, the bond has only grown stronger since their fateful parting on Crait. From time to time, when the Force so deigns, it affords them fleeting glances into each other’s worlds: the glinting black rock of his throne, or the rackety bunks in the old Rebel base. Now, as his surroundings — nondescript black paneling, Rey notes without surprise — bleed into view, she realizes defeatedly that he must see hers as well. 

His voice is low. “That’s… that’s the Rammahgon.”

Rey eyes him warily. “Yes.”

“Force, this must be the original copy,” he murmurs, stepping closer, running his fingers over the script. Even through light years of cold, empty space, Rey feels acutely the warmth of his body, the sudden and not entirely unpleasant nearness of him as he hovers over her shoulder. 

“It is. Look at the script — it’s old Aurebesh. Stars, I’ve never seen it like this… it’s beautiful.” For a moment he stays there, one long index finger tracing the elegant letters, and she chances a look over her shoulder to find his lips parted and eyes glossed in awe. At length he rocks back on his heels, sighs in understanding. “Ah. But you can’t read it.”

“I can read it,” she protests weakly. 

“No, you can’t,” he counters — softly, understandingly, as if he knows her better than she knows herself. “Skywalker never taught us. He didn’t know himself. I had to learn it on my own.”

Even the mention of his dead master cannot quash her curiosity and she asks, quietly, “How?”

Memory is a dreaded, painful thing for him; this much she feels, and has felt for some time, through their bond. But now he sighs and says, in low, musing tones, “He took us on… pilgrimages. To Jedi temples, holy sites. I transcribed all the inscriptions I saw and compared them to the translations printed in the modern texts.”    

 _Nerd_ , she almost replies.

Instead she finds herself asking, in spite of herself, in spite of _everything_ — “Would you teach me?” 

The memory comes to both of them at once: an indigo night and swirling snow, a canyon gaped wide and deathly just beneath them, the purple hiss of crossed sabers. _You need a teacher!_

“Of course,” he answers now, simply. And when he leans forward, curving the breadth of his chest over her shoulder to point out how the old Jenth is actually inverted, see, and bisected by a downward slash to indicate its capitalization… stars, but there’s something familiar in his instruction, as if she’s been learning from him all this time, and only just now understands how.


	12. soft

“Your hair is so soft,” she tells him on Naboo, in the tender warmth of the springtime sun, when she crowns his dark, splendid curls with a braided coronet of millaflower. “There,” she murmurs, sitting back on her heels, smiling. “I think your grandmother would be proud.” 

“Your hair is so soft,” she whispers in their bed, when the pink sunrise spills through the open window and threads the dark silk of his hair with the light of dawn. Slowly, rhythmically, she cards her fingers through it until he wakes and kisses her good morning.

“Your hair is so — soft,” she gasps when it brushes against the soft skin of her inner thigh, and her back arches off the bed and she falls apart under his tongue. He murmurs something in response, but it’s low and lost inside of her.

“Your hair is so soft,” she tells their newborn son, running her hand reverently over the black fuzz that crowns his head. The child coos, its pudgy fist curling around Rey’s index finger. And as Ben’s hands fall steadily on her shoulders, she kisses their son’s nose and whispers, “You get that from your father, you know.”


	13. dust

When the Force connects them, he’s in his quarters, silent and alone, seated on the edge of his narrow bed and hunched inelegantly over his knees. There’s a quivering tension in the muscles of his back and shoulders, a strange hum of potential energy that Rey feels through the Force, and is reluctant to engage.

But he turns, sensing her presence, and when their eyes meet her reluctance turns to trepidation. 

“You’re injured,” he says immediately, standing. “Your arm.”  

Rey inclines her head toward the ground, touches her broken arm as if to protect it. “It’s nothing.”

“No,” he returns, advancing closer now, his tone biting and cold. “It’s broken.” His fingers fall to the bruised flesh, and the Force allows her a ghostly, whispering sensation of their touch. “What happened?”

“The roof fell in,” she answers quietly. “One of the conference rooms. It’s an old base.”

Now his grip tightens around her arm, and Rey winces in pain. “Of course those scum are holed up in an old, shoddy base,” he scoffs. “And with old, shoddy med tech, too. It’ll kill you before it saves you.“ 

“Ben,” she whispers warningly.

“Leave them in the dust, where they belong,” he hisses lowly, wrenching her toward him by the tender, bruise-riddled flesh of her arm. Tears bud in her eyes, but he’s blinded now and doesn’t notice them. “I could help you.” The soft fold of skin beneath his eye twitches, and his throat bobs. “Force, to think of them presuming to care for you, and not even knowing you – locking you up in some run-down hovel, a-a prison of fool’s dreams!” His voice drops to a furious whisper, and his grip grows still more possessive. “I’ll help you. I’ll find you! And I’ll bring you back myself!”

“Ben, calm down!” she gasps, eyes finding his as they burn with rage. “You’re scaring me!” Their locked gazes drop to her arm, and she whispers, almost plaintively, “You’re hurting me.”

At this last plea the storm of fury around him cools and dissolves, and he recoils, releasing her arm as if it had burned him, and not the other way around. “I’m sorry,” he breathes, shame threading the words. “I-I didn’t–”

Rey closes her eyes, folding her arm back into her chest, caging it protectively with the other. “Just go.”

“Rey, please,” he croaks, tired, and his shoulders slump as if carrying the weight of the universe. “Let me help you.”

“I don’t need your help,” she answers sharply. 

He knows this. He’s known it since Starkiller, but it pains him all the same, bleeds a river of aching and loneliness from his eyes into the weary lines of his face. 

When he speaks, it’s after a long, heavy silence. “But I need you.”

Another silence follows now, but it’s alive and fraught with feeling and not silent at all. Rey looks to him in wonder. A question is poised on her lips, and the answer on his. Something like hope flickers across his open, pleading face. 

And it’s this face, this face of a man just beginning to understand what it is to feel - entirely, triumphantly on his own, and not by some distant other’s manipulating hand - that she last sees, and yearns to touch, before he vanishes into the ether.

“I need you, too,” she whispers into the empty air.   


	14. saving water

It’s late in the day, close to the magic, purplish hour of twilight, when Rey returns from training to her quarters and tosses her saber on the narrow console table, Ben trailing behind her. The room is striped with shadow and dying sunlight, and quiet save for their low, labored breathing. Rey closes her eyes, feels the ghost of a smile come to her lips. Life is simple now, and good. Peaceful.

Suddenly Ben is just behind her, gathering her into his arms, drawing her back flush against his chest, nuzzling the sweat-shining skin that slopes from her neck to her shoulder. Rey’s smile grows wider, and she leans into him.

Until, that is, she wrinkles her nose in disgust. “Ugh,” she sighs, straining forward now against the thick, taut muscle of his arms. “You _smell_.”

He draws back, giving each armpit an experimental sniff. “Do I?”

Rey bites back her grin and shoves him toward the ‘fresher. “ _Yes_. Wash up, and then we’ll talk.”

“Talk?” Ben arches an eyebrow, advancing toward her again. His fingers settle on her jaw, and his thumb trails lazily across her mouth, prying it open. “I had something else in mind.”

“Shower first,” she retorts, with as much resolve as she can muster.

But her resolve is a flimsy thing, at least in this. Through the cracked ‘fresher door Rey watches as Ben peels off his sweat-soaked clothes, watches as his abdomen twists and tenses with the effort of removing his shirt, watches as his back arches, shoulders flexing, as he bends to tug down his pants. 

And to her treacherous delight he pauses now, naked, with one foot in the shower and one foot out. “You know,” he says, glancing over his shoulder, “you should probably join me. It’ll save water.”

He doesn’t need to ask twice. A mere smattering of seconds, really no time at all, and she’s joined him in the rapidly steaming ‘fresher. “Is that so?” she lilts, forcing herself to keep a steady, methodical pace as she divests herself of her vest, now her shirt, now the wrappings around her arms. “Since when do you care about sustainability?”

“You’re not the only one with desert blood, you know,” he says, eyes darkening as he watches her undress. 

“Ah,” she sighs. The water sings against her skin when she steps into the shower, and his hands claim her hips greedily. “A Skywalker of Tatooine, hmm?”

“Clever girl.” 

Now she yields him her mouth, sighing beneath an urgent, hungry kiss. All at once the shower tile is cool against her back, his hands warm against her front. “So you see,” he murmurs, the words humming against water-slicked lips, “it’s really just about saving water.”


End file.
